


The Ice That Burns

by LulaIsAKitten



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Frostbite, Gen, Hurt Porthos du Vallon, Hurt/Comfort, Musketeer March 2021, Rescue, Snow and Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29799267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LulaIsAKitten/pseuds/LulaIsAKitten
Summary: For Musketeer March 2021. Day two - ice/cold, and also vaguely for week one - Musketeer relationships. That includes h/c and rescue, right?Porthos has been missing for days. Have they found him in time?
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	The Ice That Burns

“Porthos!”

He’s barely aware of the shout in his ear. It comes from far away, and wherever it is, he wants it to stay there. It lives in the place where the pain was, and he’s mercifully managed to leave that now, floating peacefully away from it. He has no wish to go back.

The voice isn’t going to be denied, though. It’s insistent and annoying, even though it brings with it a good dose of fondness. A part of him that he no longer needs wants to smile as the thought of youthful dark eyes slides into his mind. A comrade; young, yes, but—

There’s another voice now, issuing orders. He can feel a tugging, this way and that, and pain begins to make itself felt again through the comfortable mist cocooning his senses. He resists, trying to stop the pulling hands.

“He’s alive!”

“Thank God. Get him up here.”

There’s a swing and then a jolt that jars his whole body; the soft, gentle surface that was beneath him has been replaced by a solid hardness that digs into his shoulder blades.

“Fill this bucket with snow. More snow.” A third voice. They’re all here, then. Dimly he recognises that he knows these voices, that they belong together, and that somehow he belongs with them.

“What—?”

“Just do it!”

There’s a thud near him, a whinny of a horse, the jangle of a harness.

“Give me the bucket. Now go! We have to get him back to the cottage. D’Artagnan, ride ahead and tell them to light a fire, warm some water. I want that room hotter than Hades. Go!”

Hoofbeats recede. He hears the soft, commanding voice, the one he knows is in charge, order the horses forward, and suddenly he’s jolting, and agony slices through him at every move. He’d scream if he could remember how.

“Can you try not to hit every rut in the road?” This is the voice that called for the bucket of snow, the voice that heals. Maybe this voice can take the pain away.

A sardonic answer. “It’s dark. And it’s barely a road.”

Hands are still tugging at him. His own hands and feet, that he hasn’t been able to feel in longer than he can remember, are being buffeted.

“What are you doing to him?”

“It’s supposed to ward off frostbite.”

“Rubbing more snow on?”

“They say you shouldn’t warm them too fast, it kills the flesh.”

No more is said, but for some reason he has an image of a quirked eyebrow in his mind now.

He wishes the pain would stop, but it’s getting worse. He wants to go back to the place where it didn’t hurt any more.

“Porthos!” A jolt across his face brings him back from the warmth he was trying to find. It also snaps a name into his brain - _Aramis_. Aramis has just slapped him.

“Stay with me, Porthos. With us. Stay awake.”

He tries to speak, but his tongue is too thick, his throat too numb.

“Don’t try to talk. Just stay awake.”

Pain creeps in from every angle. Into his back, his legs, his hands, his feet. Particularly his chest. Aramis is scrubbing methodically at each limb in turn, and all he’s bringing is more agony. _Some healer._

Slowly returning, too, is the twisted knot deep in his stomach, that started some hours in and got worse and worse. He’d escaped it, drifting away from it into the hazy warmth, but now it’s back, gnawing at him, reminding him of the deep belly ache of long-denied hunger in his childhood, only more excruciating. Duller, heavier, harder to bear.

Again he tries to retreat from it all, to find the place of safety, and again the slap across his face, the gentle healing voice rising a little. He can hear the note of panic and dimly wonders if that’s for him.

“Can’t we go any faster?”

“Do you want fast, or do you want gentle?”

Aramis mutters an oath, and Porthos is vaguely aware of a twist of amusement cutting through the waves of agony.

“Fast. Just get us there.”

The jolting grows worse, the pain attacks him from all angles, and time becomes meaningless.

...

“Put him there.” It’s the next thing he hears, and he’s being swung through a doorway and onto something mercifully soft.

“Not too near the fire. We have to warm him slowly.”

“Surely we just need to get him warm as fast as possible?” The voice that was missing is back. _D’Artagnan_ , his mind supplies. The young one, his voice betraying every emotion as always. Fear, now.

“Not too fast,” Aramis replies.

“But—”

“Aramis knows what he’s doing.” _Athos_. That’s Athos. Quiet, commanding, settling the excitable youngster.

The soft pile of cloth he’s lying on is dragged across the floor a little. Hands are tugging at him again, peeling at his clothes.

“ _Mon dieu_ , this leather is frozen. How long was he out there?” Aramis again.

Athos’s voice is low. “He was three days overdue to report back to the camp. That doesn’t mean that’s how long he was stuck there.”

“Trees don’t just drop huge branches on people for no reason,” D’Artagnan argues. “It must have been the weight of the snowfall, and that storm was two nights ago.”

“He can’t have been buried under there for two nights; he’d be dead.”

“He very nearly was.” Aramis’s voice is grim. “He’s got a rough day ahead.”

The healer is not wrong. The room is warm, but the heat is so far away from Porthos that he can barely feel it. What he can feel is hot needles under his skin, starting in his fingers and toes and working back. His digits feel as though they’re trying to swell out of their own skin like sausages splitting over a fire. They burn as though held in scalding water and dance with a thousand pinpricks.

The knot in his stomach, that started when he first grew too cold and mercifully faded when he finally succumbed to sleep, is so tight now that he feels sick. They try to feed him soup, but he heaves just at the smell, his ribs on fire with the wrenching.

“Water. At least sip warm water,” Aramis murmurs, and he manages to force down a few mouthfuls, his throat aching from disuse. He’d shouted for the first few hours, he remembers now, then intermittently for a day, hoping to attract passers by. It had been a faint hope, and a useless one.

Fingers probe his chest and shoulder, and he’s vaguely aware of a different kind of agony, but it all blends into one hellish, whole-body scream at this point.

“Couple of broken ribs,” Aramis is muttering. “And his shoulder was crushed, but I think it’s not broken...”

Time goes by, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. He’s exhausted, but Aramis won’t let him sleep. As the burning spreads, he starts trying to force Porthos to move, dragging him up to sit, manipulating his arms and legs.

“What are you _doing_?” D’Artagnan voices the question Porthos is too tired and numb to form.

“Trying to get his blood to move,” Aramis answers grimly. “And don’t just stand there. Go and find more wood, we need that fire going all night.”

Boots clump across the floor. The door swings open and closed, and Porthos feels the cold draught; it’s the first time he’s been able to tell warm from cold in a very long time.

Not long after that, the shivering starts again. He’d dimly wondered when he’d stopped shivering all those hours ago if that was a bad omen, but the retreating misery had been welcome. He’s told by a pleased-sounding Aramis that it’s a good sign now, that his body is fighting its way back to normal, but it’s hard to believe anything this bone-rattling can be a good thing. His belly aches as though there’s an ice-cold stone in it, and waves of shuddering wrack his huge frame, making his teeth clash together until his jaw aches.

They begin, now, to wrap him in blankets that are warmed by the fire. Gradually it dawns on him that warmth has stopped hurting, that it’s welcome now. It’s agony when, every hour or so, they remove each blanket to replace it with a new, freshly warmed one.

“He feels feverish,” Aramis mutters at some point.

“Is that bad?” Athos asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe his body has forgotten how to keep an even temperature.”

At last, at long, long last, they let him sleep, and he sinks into oblivion. The final thing he hears as he slides into the warmth - a good warmth, this time - are the murmured voices of his friends.

“He’s going to make it. And with all his fingers and toes, I think.”

“Thanks to you, Aramis. Again.”


End file.
